Quality and Efficiency of the School System - An Analysis

After many years in the comfort of general public trust, education has come under scrutiny. The World Bank points out that India lacks an effective quality assurance mechanism at the secondary level of schooling. Efforts to improve the quality of secondary education are thus urgent. There must be some type of controlling mechanism intertwined with school management for ensuring the quality of the system. This paper is an integral part of the doctoral dissertation – ‘A study of Management Practices of Secondary Schools'. The principal objective of the study is to study the perceptions of the school heads towards the need for instituting a comprehensive quality control mechanism into the school management system. A sample of 188 secondary schools – about 34% of the population in Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh in India, was selected through stratified sampling technique. The primary data was collected through self designed questionnaire and interview schedules. The findings reveal a strong association between the type of school and the preference for quality control mechanism. Schools under public sector and aided managements are majorly reluctant where as a huge majority of the unaided managements showed strong preference for instituting a quality control mechanism